Monday, December 28, 2015

This is blasphemy! Personal choice cannot--MUST NOT!--have anything to do with how contemporary Western women behave. The misogyny of the patriarchy explains why there are so relatively few women in the STEM fields!

Sunday, December 27, 2015

If Trump announcing his plan to restrict Muslim immigration into the US is an effective ISIS recruitment tool--as the establishment suggests it is (and Hillary Clinton claims it has been)--isn't that an argument in favor of Trump's plan? Trump should ask the rhetorical question--or just assert it, as is his style--whenever an interviewer brings it up.

Terrorists lie at the tail of a distribution of people with varying degrees of sympathy, shared values, shared beliefs, and willingness to help or ignore. If you can understand that then a bunch of liberal beliefs about terrorism look absurd.

Through the month of December, Sanders' support among black Democrats has been even lower than it had been in previous months. From the summer, when I/R began daily tracking for the 2016 election, through December 24th, Hillary leads Sanders among black Democrats 72.9%-16.0%, an advantage approaching the advantage Democrat candidates have over Republicans in the general election, and strikingly similar to the black advantage Obama enjoyed over Hillary in 2008.

It's easy to forget that Hillary beat Obama handily among whites, 56%-44%, and among Hispanics, 64%-36%, in the 2008 Democrat primaries. But she was trounced among the most monolithic voting bloc in the US and that cost her the election. Blacks backed Obama, 85%-15%.

Hillary learned the hard way that there is no winning the Democrat nomination without dominating the black vote. White liberals are simply not going to vote en masse against a candidate that black Democrats support (that would be Racist!--it if did occur, it would signal an enormous fissure in the Fringe Coalition), and black Democrats all vote for the same person. So whoever that person is gets the nomination. In 2016, that person is Hillary.

Interest in Kwanzaa--primarily among elementary and middle school teachers obliged by public school curricula to mention it, I presume--has been steadily decreasing each winter and there is little reason to expect this trend to be interrupted. Just look at the holiday's official website. Yikes. Search frequencies on the term over the last ten years, via Google Trends:

Monday, December 21, 2015

Data on volunteered electoral preferences among Hispanic Republicans are scant. Reuters-Ipsos daily tracking consistently has a Republican/independent sample that is too small for Hispanics for the term to register as a identifiable category. I have been able to track down a couple of state polls in Georgia and Florida, both conducted in November, that have cross-tabs for candidate support and Hispanic ethnicity. Both consist of responses from "likely Republican primary voters".

In Georgia, Rubio gets 43% of the Hispanic support to Cruz's 23%. They get 8% and 12% of the state's total GOP support, respectively (keep in mind this was before Carson's precipitous decline began, back when Rubio and Cruz were a distant third and fourth). Yes, tribalism is everywhere--backing support among Hispanics out, we see that the two Hispanic candidates garner less than 20% of the state's overall Republican support, but 66% of its Hispanic Republican support.

In Florida, Rubio gets 23% of support from Hispanics of Cuban ancestry to Cruz's 9%. Among non-Cuban Hispanics, Rubio gets 9% and Cruz only 3%. Notably, Trump beats them both, getting 25% of Cuban support and 41% of non-Cuban Hispanic support in the state. Immigration from Mexico isn't a salient issue in Florida. Among all Republican Floridians, Rubio gets 16% to Cruz's 10%.

What do exist of the sparse data suggest that the ethnic pull is, at least currently, stronger with Rubio than it is with Cruz.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Donald Trump's conception of his own campaign has entered its third distinct phase.

The first phase was about receiving publicity, allegedly in front of an investment deal. Say some things that resonate with a large number of people that aren't otherwise being said, give attention to what needs attending to while simultaneously raising the personal profile.

Trump entered the second phase sometime after the first Republican presidential debate in early August. He decided he was in it to win and made the requisite ground game acquisitions with celerity.

The fifth debate made clear that he has now entered a third phase, one characterized by his confidence that he is going to win the GOP nomination.

In standard Trumpian fashion, he's check-mated the GOP establishment. They didn't want him stealing votes as an independent when they naively believed he didn't stand a chance of getting the Republican nomination. Now that he's going to get it, they're desperate for him to run as an independent. It'd be a lot more difficult for him to win the general election that way, and many of the puppet masters would rather see Hillary Clinton elected than see Trump win. The party tried to ambush him, but Trump's ambuscade was already lying in wait for them. Once again he has outmaneuvered the entire party establishment.

Another sure sign is apparent in the way Trump is now extending his hand to potential allies, and not just Cruz (start at 3:39 in the video), but also others farther down the pecking order. He explicitly made it known that he watched the undercard debate (relevant video queued at the link). This isn't in keeping with his generally dismissive attitude towards the ankle biters bumping around at the bottom, but it was quite purposeful here. Trump is sending a clear message that he is watching, and those who are prudent enough to aid him as he consolidates support and wraps the nomination up quickly will find their loyalty rewarded. For those who aren't, well, it's off the dais for them.

Since I'm assuming the role of epigone (though let the record show a Trump/Cruz ticket was predicted here several months ago!), allow me to allay my own fears with the most recent polling data. In early August, when the Trump phenomenon was in its seminal stages, I wrote:

I don't think Trump's going to win the GOP nomination. If he manages to stand against the entire Establishment (really, all the opinion-making organs of society are against him--both political parties, the major media, big business, etc) through multiple debates where traps will continue to be set exclusively for him, what'll end up happening is that as the other ~16 GOP contenders drop out of the race one by one, they'll all start throwing their support behind one of the non-Trump candidates still in, so that it'll eventually just be Trump vs top Establishment candidate and most of the ~75% of Republican voters who are spread out across non-Trump candidates right now will come together against him.

Post-debate polling from PPP, I'm happy to report, suggests I had been excessively pessimistic*. The survey asked Republican primary participants how they'd vote in hypothetical head-to-head contests for the GOP nomination. In these sceanrios Trump crushes Bush 58%-34%, crushes Carson 57%-34%, and crushes Rubio 54%-38%. Only Cruz gives Trump a run for his money, with Trump leading the Texas senator by a single point, 45%-44%.

This is yet still more terrible news for the Republican establishment. A solid majority of Republican voters now say they would back Trump over any of the establishment-approved marionettes.

* Parenthetically, to put this thread in context, I was pointing to how successful Trump's early campaign had been up to that point and how I didn't think it was going away anytime soon in the face of a chorus of people who dismissed it as a circus that would be over as quickly as it had started.

The phrase "Trump phenomenon" really is a fitting one. It's easy to forget that mere months ago no one with a megaphone thought Trump had a shot in hell.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Liking Carson is an easy way to attain cheap grace. We get it, you're not racist!

Rand Paul has been a major disappointment. His father took slings and arrows as he constructed a launching pad for Rand to climb into, but Rand insisted on making a bunch of modifications that severely comprised the effectiveness of that launching pad.

Everything about ¡Jabe!'s campaign is a disaster. How stupid the GOP establishment must be to have ever put any stock in that buffoon.

Parenthetically, I limited this to the nine Republican candidates who were allowed on stage for the primary event at the most recent debate.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

We see that 11% of the survey sample is from a Hispanic-speaking background. When the subsequent question about racial self-identification is asked, respondents are given four options to choose from: White, Black, Asian, or Other.

However, 6% refused to pick one of the four options provided and instead volunteered "Hispanic" as an answer. Most Hispanics consider the term to be more than just a linguistic or ethnic identifier, they also consider it to be a racial one.

Without being prompted to think of "Hispanic" in racial terms, more than half the Hispanics surveyed asserted that they were racially Hispanic. How many smug SWPLs who bray about how "'Hispanic' is not a race!" will call Hispanics out on their ignorance?

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Trump's perpetual extemporaneity is an impressive attribute, one that vanishingly few politicians are able to pull off. But there are times even he should commit 30 seconds or so to memory beforehand. His closing statements--which are always opportunities for people to freewheel without having to respond to a specific question or comment--aren't as polished as they could be.

***

Rand Paul makes the commonsense remark that military spending is, in fact, government spending. It's a huge reason our national debt is in the tens of trillions of dollars.

***

Trump stays on the "walls-works-just-ask-Israel" point. The neocons continue to squirm. Genius.

***

Rubio remains the Amnesty King. Apparently everyone he knows are immigrants, including his entire family and his wife's entire family, so I guess it's no surprise as to who he cares about most.

***

Trump to Bush: I'm at 42%, you're at 3%. You keep moving farther and farther out from the center. Before long you'll be off the stage altogether.

Can't happen soon enough.

***

Come on Wolf, make Christie explain why it is "reckless" to allow Russia to assert its interests in Crimea? What the hell does that have to do with the US?

***

Fiorina wants to reignite it, too. Ditto the snowball remark.

***

Kasich wants to reignite the Cold War. Good thing he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

***

Sane foreign policy: Trump, Cruz, Paul, Carson

Insane foreign policy: Kasich, Bush, Fiorina, Rubio, Christie

***

John Kasich, who supported the Iraq War, says we need to topple Assad's Alawite regime so Iran doesn't become stronger.

Nothing has made Iran stronger than the US war in Iraq has.

To repeat, Kasich is a caricature of everything that is wrong with the contemporary Republican party.

***

Rubio wanted Qaddafi to fall. The blood of the European refugee crisis and the dispossession of the old continent is on his hands.

***

Cruz said that toppling Saddam, Qaddafi, and Mubarak were bad ideas?! How'd I miss that?

He needs to be Trump's VP.

***

Carson is an honorary Bush tonight: If we don't fight them there, we'll be fighting them here!

No, if we don't let them in here, we won't be fighting them here, period.

***

Paul and Trump are the only two who realize that Assad is, relatively speaking (very relatively speaking!), the good guy in the Syrian civil war.

***

Rand Paul, the constitution says nothing about how the US has to deal with declared enemies. He must've gotten it confused with the Geneva Conventions. The constitution should be taken seriously. The Geneva Conventions, on the other hand, are at most merely suggestive.

***

Asymmetrical warfare is the only way jihadis have a chance. Make it symmetrical and they are finished. Trump gets that, Bush wants more and more and more and more of the same.

***

Cruz is only partially right. No, the FBI won't pay attention to a self-identified jihadist from Saudi Arabia who was granted a visa to stay in the US a year ago, but it will pay extra attention to a self-reliant white guy who thinks the 2nd amendment is worth preserving.

***

Bush: Islam is a religion of peace.

Which Bush, you ask? All of them.

***

Chris Christie makes a reference to medieval scholasticism. Who says American politics are uniformly low-brow?

***

When Rand Paul is attacking you from the restrictionist side of the immigration debate, you know you are the amnesty king. Rubio is the worst

***

Cruz wants to restrict immigration and restrict the capabilities of the NSA to snoop on American's phone calls. Rubio wants open immigration and an all-powerful NSA. At least we see the contrast--open borders necessitates all kinds of Big Brother programs to monitor the problems those open borders create.

***

ISIS never comes into existence without the US-led regime changes in Iraq and Syria. Most of the Republican lineup is apparently incapable of learning anything from the past.

***

Rubio notes that one of the California shooters was an American citizen, second generation. That's exactly why immigration is so crucial to the National Question. Large numbers of people living in the US who are of non-European descent do not assimilate to liberal American norms, even several generations in. If it were only immigrants who caused problems, we wouldn't have near the immigration problem that we do. It runs so much deeper than the political class (sans Trump) is willing to acknowledge.

***

Bush: We can't invade the world unless we also invite the world. We have to let them come here while we fight them there. That's the only way they won't cause problems here.

Airtight logic. Bush wants to continue where his brother left off. Heaven help us.

Trump's advantage over the rest of the Republican field among self-described independents and members of third parties is nearly twice as large as it is among self-described Republicans. Here are Ipsos-Reuters top five among Republicans as of December 15 (well past the latest campaign-finishing remarks about a moratorium on Muslims entering the US):

Among GOP voters, Trump's support is 230% that of Cruz, 282% of Carson, 347% of Rubio, and 358% of Bush. Among Republicans, then, Trump has a little more than twice the support of second place.

Among independents and third party people, Trump's support is 376% that of Bush, 447% that of Carson, 533% that of Rubio, and 582% that of Paul. Among independents and third partiers, Trump has nearly four times the support second place enjoys.

Trump trumps the field among Republicans, but he outdoes himself among independents.

Given Trump's salience, what is being picked up here with whoever-vs-Trump is a reflexive rejection of Trump among the types of people who know nothing at all about politics besides what they see in social media feeds ("Trump? No way, I'm not waaaacist!"). They instinctively choose the anti-Trump in a head-to-head match up, but that doesn't translate into support for any particular candidate when that "registered voter" is asked to choose from a list of people because they don't know who any of the people are and they won't be voting anyway.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Time chose Angela Merkel. The award allegedly identifies the person who has the most effect on the year's news, not necessarily the most benevolent one, so being the destroyer of Germania does not mandate disqualification.

There were seven other finalists, including Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Black Lives Matter activists, Donald Trump, Caitlyn Jenner, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Bernie Sanders won the online readers' poll (which tells more about the readership of Time than it does about the salience of Sanders).

The following bar graph compares relative search interest for Merkel and the other eight listed above from January 1, 2015 through December 10, 2015. The higher the number, the greater the number of searches for the person or group worldwide. Google Trends generates the figures. It's not clear to me exactly what these numbers represent beyond relative search volumes:

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Liberals are nearly five times as likely (465%) to be gay or bisexual as conservatives are. While 7.9% of liberals (1,240) are intimately interested in members of the same sex, just 1.7% of conservatives (n = 2,161) are.

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

If instead of calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Trump had called for a 30% reduction, what would the reactions have been? I suspect they would've been virtually indistinguishable from the apoplectic reactions what he called for set off. The idea of restricting immigration, in any degree, from a group that has put Europe's existential crisis in stark relief and that is at least 100 times as likely to commit fatal acts of terrorism in the US as non-Muslims are is--well, was!--off the table.

Would it be deemed acceptable to call for an end to Nazi immigration into the US? If so, the putative problem lies in the specifics, not in the question itself. So why are Muslims accorded privileged status, a status they make no effort to reciprocate?

You're comparing Muslims to Nazis?! Wow, just wow! Unbelievable! At the same time it is, of course, considered perfectly legitimate to compare Trump and his supporters to Nazis.

There is nothing more inherently conservative, in the most basic sense of the word, than restricting immigration. There is nothing more inherently transformative than mass immigration.

But that's not who we are!

Well, it's who we were by behavior from the settling of Jamestown through the 1920s (nearly 90% of immigrants came from Europe during this long period of time), and it is who we were explicitly from the 1920s through the 1960s (when national quotas were put in place to check significant immigration from outside of Europe). Perhaps the last half century--with plateauing high school graduation and poverty rates, increasing out-of-wedlock birth rates, skyrocketing divorce rates, rising inequality, cratering fertility, etc--has been America's golden age. Or perhaps it hasn't been.

Parenthetically, I would've tweaked the message to a "total and complete shutdown" of immigration from majority-Muslim countries. It would presumably be easier to execute in practice and it would draw attention to the fact that there are close to 50 Muslim countries in the world that putative refugees could potentially go to instead of settling in Western countries, where their customs and values are wildly at odds with those of their receiving populations.

But I've been fighting futilely for over a decade to expand the width of the Overton Window a few inches and then Donald Trump comes along and over the course of a few short months transforms it from a ground-level basement window into a 98-floor skyscraper. The man's results speak for themselves.

Sunday, December 06, 2015

The contrasting crowd reactions here and here starkly illustrate what motivates people on the right and what doesn't. It's terrible news for the Cathedral. The dissident right is unquestionably on the ascent.

Speaking of the Cathedral, is this a Trumpian dog whistle to those dissident rightists?

Maybe not, as explicitness is Trump's style. "[You Jews are] not going to support me because I don't want your money" (source).

In a recent podcast, Tom Woods interviewed Michael Edelstein on the negative consequences resulting from an ongoing societal effort to ubiquitously foster high levels of self-esteem in everyone. Woods asked when it all began. Edelstein guessed the sixties, but expressed uncertainty in his answer.

It is also worth considering how much the political orientation gap among white Republicans and white Democrats has widened over time. In the mid-seventies, white Republicans were only slightly more likely to self-identify as politically conservative than white Democrats were. That difference has trebled in the last four decades to the point that white Republicans are now far more likely to identify as conservative than white Democrats are.

Political orientation is probably more heritable than partisan affiliation. I'd guess the gap will appear wider on the liberal-moderate-conservative spectrum than on the Democrat-independent-Republican one.

Parenthetically, educational attainment looks to be the driving force, not intelligence. Fertility by wordsum score varies little once educational attainment is controlled for, but educational attainment is a strong predictor even after wordsum score is controlled for--put more clearly, educational attainment is 5x as strong a predictor of fertility as IQ is.

Instead of guessing, I should do the requisite data delving to evaluate that assertion about political orientation being a stronger predictor of fertility than partisan affiliation for whites. The results, using parameters similar to Hail's*, are as follows (with % of white female population in parentheses):

Indeed, the fertility gap appears wider on the liberal-conservative spectrum than it does on the Democrat-Republican one. Hail's results show a white Republican:white Democrat total fertility rate ratio of 2.07:1.76. The white conservative:white liberal total fertility rate ratio is twice as large, at 2.23:1.65.

* I used the COHORT variable to pull data from those born between 1944-1974 while being able to exclude survey results from 1994, 1996, and 1998 since in those years "white" includes Hispanic. From 2000 onward, non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics are separated into distinct categories. Consequently, his numbers include some Hispanics, while mine are only comprised of non-Hispanic whites. Also, what Hail terms "political orientation" I regularly describe as "partisan affiliation". I use the phrase "political orientation" to refer to the liberal-moderate-conservative spectrum rather than the Democrat-independent-Republican one.

Friday, December 04, 2015

From the latestCNN phone-based poll (the type of survey Trump tends to fare relatively poorly in compared to the internet-based variety) that has Trump in first at 36% and Cruz trailing at a distant second with 16%:

There's a sharp divide among Republican voters on these questions about deportation between those who back Trump and those who do not. Among Trump supporters, 67% say the government should attempt to deport all people living in the country illegally, while just 39% of Republican voters backing other candidates agree.

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

The summary of what follows is the major media continue to present Trump's chances in the least favorable light possible, far past the point where any plausible deniability that an attempt is being made to present news on the Republican presidential nomination in an objective fashion can be seriously offered. So if the specifics are of little interest, don't waste your time. I get that to point out the mendacity of a media structure whose relevance is in a state of perpetual decline is to point out the obvious, but it is still worth doing from time to time if for no other reason than to remind those who don't follow the major media closely that things haven't changed much.

It comes from Reuters' daily tracking, which had Trump as high as 42.9% at one point during November, distantly trailed by a #2 at 13.6%. If you're following the Real Clear Politics average that has been used to determine the debate lineups that have occurred thus far, you'll immediately recognize how out-of-line the Reuters numbers are with the other polls that make up the RCP average. Even after appearing to fall over a cherry-picked five-day period to 31%, Reuters had Trump up on second place by over 15 points, a margin wider than any of those included in the RCP average. Parenthetically, over the subsequent five days, Trump has climbed back to 36% in the Reuters poll, more than 20 points ahead of #2.

From RCP's average, the astute observer will also notice a seemingly inexplicable two week period in the first half of November when no new data were incorporated into the rolling average:

Curiously, that two week period began immediately after a couple of recent polls had shown Carson neck-and-neck with Trump. The red dash on the left shows when the fortnight of silence began and the oval on the right shows the polls that were used to show the current RCP average during that two-week period. Polls since then have shown Trump leading significantly.

So we have a media complex that was mum on Reuters polling (which is internet-based) throughout the first several months of the campaign when it found Trump's lead to be even wider than the phone-based polls that RCP uses were showing. Then when Trump takes an apparent dive in that ongoing tracking poll that had until then remained hidden in plain sight, the headlines converge on the magnitude of the apparent drop.

Parenthetically, I don't use "apparent" flippantly here. The range of error on these tracking polls is around 5-7 points. For example, when Reuters had Trump at 31% a week ago, it also noted that this suggested his true support was somewhere in the 27%-37% range! To report putative climbs or drops from a single poll that are within the margin of error of what other recent polls have shown is irresponsible and also suggests innumeracy.

And we also have a media complex that sits on polling data when what has already been revealed makes it look like someone is closing the gap on Trump, the hope being that by artificially keeping the Trump-losing-ground narrative around for awhile, Trump's actual support will fade. As Trump's lead in the phone-based polling amalgamation is now, at 10 points, consistently larger than it has been at any point since September, that media tactic had to be shelved for the time being.

If you need a reminder of why Trump must be the candidate of the dissident right, here he is trashing two of the most prominent members of the neocon old guard from the Bush years. First, Bill Kristol:

Saturday, November 28, 2015

- I use a termite bait station to keep termites from getting into my house because I know their presence will lower my family's quality of life. I support the construction of a border fence to keep illegal immigrants from south of the border out of my country because I know their presence will lower my family's quality of life. As it is not fear but simple prudence that compels me in both of these cases, the terms "termitephobic" and "xenophobic" are both equally inapplicable for describing my behavior.

- Assuming a stable population, even at the most theoretically violent, where martial prowess and an unrelenting focus on pugilistic tactics would put the Spartans to shame, the average person can, at the very maximum, only kill one person over the course of his entire lifetime. This occurred to me when I recently heard Lew Rockwell talking about how incredibly unnerving an experience it is for the vast majority of people to be put in a the situation of having to take another person's life, irrespective of the context. To have killed more than one person is to be an extreme historical rarity.

- These shirts are floating around my neck of the woods:

There is some grim satisfaction in watching the same people who superciliously call Kansas "Brownbackistan" now criticize the governor for resisting the transformation of his state into something that will genuinely move it in the direction of resembling an actual crapistan.

- Using the image above as a segue, the percentages of self-identified homosexuals who have engaged in heterosexual sex is 34.4% for gay men and 66.1% for lesbians. The percentages of self-identified heterosexuals who have engaged in homosexual sex is 6.1% for men and 5.3% for women.

Some non-exhaustive conjecture on why homosexuals engaging in heterosexual sex is significantly more likely than heterosexuals engaging in homosexual sex is: A relatively tiny pool of potential preferred partners for gays, perceived social pressure to conform to a non-deviant lifestyle, and the existence of more of a sexual spectrum for those exhibiting sexual dysfunction than for those with normal sexual function.

- Answers to the question "Would you be more or less likely to support for president a candidate who is Jewish?" among Hispanic, black, and white Republican survey respondents:

Hispanics

Blacks

White Republicans

That's a less likely-to-more likely breakdown of 70.6%-29.4% for Hispanics, 70.8%-29.2% for blacks, and 60.0%-40.0% for white Republicans. This in spite of the fact that white Republicans are almost certainly more likely to be cognizant of the fact that Bernie Sanders--a man they'd never vote for--is Jewish than blacks or Hispanics are.

When it comes to the fracturing of the Coalition of the Fringes, it's more a question of when than of if.

- Finally, AE is now active on twitter, so engage me there as well if you're so inclined.

Since universal suffrage was passed into law, women voters have pushed America toward the extreme far Left. Now we have a biological underpinning that helps explain why. The liberal, social safety net, open borders preferences of women align with the political preferences of effeminate men (like John Scalzi, Alex Pareene, and Ezra Klein). The effeminate men never had much of a political voice until they were able to hitch the behemoth female voting bloc to their cause. And now we have gay marriage, mudsharking on prime time TV, and slut walks featuring half-naked fat chicks.

Donald Trump's presidential campaign warned the Republican Party on Tuesday about donors pooling funds for attack ads, saying Republicans must treat him fairly if they want to keep him from launching an independent bid.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen told CNN that if Republican donors backing different presidential candidates come together for an anti-Trump advertising campaign, it would be a "bad, bad decision."

The analogy isn't perfect. Samson's mojo was stolen by a duplicitous tramp, his eyes were gouged out, and he committed suicide in a final bout of vengeful rage. If Trump brings the walls of the Republican party crashing down in 2016, he'll walk off into the sunset even more influential, famous, and admired than he was before he stepped into that corrupted temple.

Over the summer, Reuters approached the issue in the most straightforward manner I've ever come across. In terms of fleshing out public sentiment, the approach is bar none. Respondents were asked about what should be done with illegal immigrants in the US. Only two committal answers--"deport most or all of them" and "allow most or all of them to stay"--along with a third "unsure" cop-out option, were offered as responses.

Drilling down a little further reveals why Trump's bold candidacy announcement and his incorrigible refusal to yield an inch in the intervening months--choosing instead not only to stand his ground but to advance forward--has been a political masterstroke. Fortunately, it also substantially increased the odds that Western civilization will survive the 21st century.

To show this isn't a cherry-picked artifice, data for the entire month are included. September 10th was selected above because it was end date of the 5-day polling period with the highest number of respondents over the period Reuters administered the survey question.

Slave morality -- It was an evil thing Europeans did to American Indians, so they deserve to have something similar done to them.

Master morality -- This was bad for the people who allowed it to happen to them. We will not allow it to happen to us.

Nietzsche's duality is applicable not just in the case of an individual internet meme, but on mass migration from relatively dysfunctional, violent, chaotic places to relatively functional, non-violent, controlled places more generally. Jayman may hate to quote her, but the point is so blatantly obvious that he isn't going to contest its validity:

Other than for the purposes of moral posturing and virtue signalling, there are no compelling reasons* to do it.

Humorously, as of late social justice warriors have been emphasizing the divine sanction of their mission. To many of these people, history started when they were in grade school. The religious and historical ignorance of the arguments they put forward are a consequence of this ignorance. An example of the former:

As told in Luke, the story is that Joseph and Mary were returning to Joseph's ancestral home to register for a mandatory Roman census. It's not a tale of fleeing persecution at all. To the contrary, it's a story of being legally compelled to return home.

Which, you know, is what a lot of people want the refugees to do (and what one presidential candidate has pledged to make them do).

And of the latter:

The sermon on the mount putatively occurred 600 years before Islam came into existence. Yikes.

* From a nationalist or a citizenist perspective--if the objective is the demographic displacement of white America, the reasons for support are obvious.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

A recent Associated Press headline reads "Democratic insiders rate Rubio, Kasich as tough to beat, not Trump or Carson". The AP asked Democratic superdelegates who they thought potentially presented Hillary Clinton her toughest electoral challenge. Rubio came out on top with 37%. Kasich was second at 26%, and ¡Jabe! was third with 20%. Trump got just 9%.

The attempt to propel Kasich and amnesty point man Rubio to the top is nakedly self-serving. The goodwill electoral advice offered to Republicans from Democratic insiders is about as genuine as the advice that Hispandering is the way to go. If the GOP listens to what we say they are sure to beat us, but we can't help but be helpful anyway!

Fortunately, Ipsos-Reuters' interactive polling explorer allows a check on these presumably self-serving assertions made by Democratic insiders. Here are the results from the most recent rolling 5-day period on who among those voting for Obama in 2012 would vote for on the Republican side if they had to vote for someone:

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Read the title, don't say it, because he emphatically is not. He is one of the intellectual titans of the HBD movement. But his apparent visceral disdain for Trump renders him unable to maintain his composure when the subject in question is perceived to be anywhere near the GOP front runner's orbit. Murray earlier today (issue here):

Fully fleshing out someone's position when it is presented in fewer than 140 characters is rarely a sure thing, but I read this as insinuating that Trump supporters posture about human migration and that amnesty supporters (of which Murray self-describes himself as) need to make sure they are thinking about and analyzing it to counter that posturing.

Trump supporters are the only ones who have been doing that. Serious thinking about the National Question has been and continues to be done by people who tend to view the Trump phenomenon is a positive rather than a negative development (to put it mildly).

On the other hand, maybe I'm misreading what is intended by Murray to be humble admonishment of those of a like mind, as in "Trump sucks but he and his supporters are substantively dealing with this while we're ignoring it or serving up embarrassing boilerplate about it in the WSJ and NYT".

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Bernie Sanders, aka the blacks' bitch (even though they'll never vote for him), put out a statement saying "it's time to address structural racism on college campuses." Hillary Clinton at least had the sense to maintain a degree of separation and merely retweeted a staffer who wrote "racism has no place anywhere, let alone an institution of learning". Carson, to his credit, bandied about the awkward phrase "politically correct police", in this context referring to the 'activists' and not to tongue-tied cops. Both ¡Jabe! and Rubio, put in the uncomfortable position of having to react extemporaneously, unsurprisingly had no comment.

Narrative Collapse is already occurring. It feels hyperbolic to even use the word "collapse" because the accusations are so petty:

- An alleged fecal swastika on a restroom wall for which there is no evidence of its existence other than the assertion of one black 'activist' (He didn't have a cell phone to take a picture? The immaculate defecation!)

As Columbia is less than two hours away my anecdotes may be skewed, but the reactions to these pathetic resignations I've heard--even from SWPLs I know--underscores the sense that we really are beginning to see the inchoate stirrings of white consciousness in the US. Comment sections on all the articles I've read corroborate this. It is a predictable consequence of demographic change and the dispossession that accompanies it.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Google more than doubles black and Hispanic representation and inflates Asian representation by a factor of almost ten. Even the obligatory stodgy old whites are shown to the sides and at a distance. Everyone wins! Well, except for American Indians, it must be conceded. Regrettable. Looks like Silicon Valley is indeed in need of more diversity training.

Sexual characteristics compared:

Girl power x7!

The distributions showing who has made the ultimate sacrifice would be even more retrograde than the demographic distributions of actual veterans, who--to our great shame!--do not look enough like America.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

During the fourth Republican presidential debate, Fox News flashed a word chart in which the size of words corresponded to the alleged concern about the words, the larger the words the greater the alleged concern and the smaller the words the lesser the alleged concern.

Conspicuously missing was a term that, according to Google Trends over the last month, has garnered more search interest than any of the putative top four concerns on people's minds has.

Immigration, Taxes, Homeland Security, Campaign Finance, and Size of Government

John Kasich, managing director of Lehman Brothers when it collapsed, is explaining what the federal government should do when a company like, well, Lehman Brothers becomes insolvent. This guy is a caricature of everything that is wrong with the contemporary Republican party.

Donald Trump says we shouldn't fight the rest of the world's battles for them. He suggests we should learn from our past mistakes. Jeb Bush wants more Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Vietnams. If nothing else, Trump deserves a medal for destroying Bush's campaign.

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Someone get Kasich a tissue. He's like a door-to-door salesman who won't let you go back to dinner.

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Rubio's phrase "committed isolationist" translates to "not being devoted to trying to police the world, install liberal democracies at the point of a gun in tribalistic societies that don't want them, and possibly start World War III in the process".

The neoconservative movement is alive and well in Marco Rubio.

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Jeb Bush: "[blah blah blah] and the government would get the revenue to make things better."

Good grief.

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Imagine if car insurance was like health insurance. Your insurance would pay for you to fill your tank, get your car washed, have your windows detailed, and change your oil. But when your motor or transmission went out, they'd max out coverage at $100 and you'd have to pay the rest.

Insurance should protect against catastrophe while allowing market pressures to keep costs down for the routine stuff. The American health care system works in the exact opposite way, and consequently costs are absolutely out of whack.

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Trump/Cruz 2016. It's enough to get a guy to vote Republican again.

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Donald Trump points out that the US should do what Israel does. It works for them, it'll work for us.

Then he refers to Eisenhower's Operation Wetback. The US did it 60 years ago. We can do it now.

Donald Trump crushes, crushes, crushes political correctness. He is the only candidate who understands the National Question at all.

Why is John Kasich still allowed to waste everyone's time? What a joker.

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Benghazi is a bigger scandal than Watergate, and Watergate brought down the Nixon administration. Props to Carson for calling Hillary Clinton out on presiding over it.

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Rand Paul finally talks about the federal reserve and insinuates that inflation--despite what the Keynesians and the monetarists argue--is actually a bad thing. The power to create fiat money that is not tied to anything of concrete value is the power to perpetually tax the entire population, and to do so furtively. If the real value of a dollar stayed constant, or even decreased, there would be no need to increase the minimum wage for people to enjoy a higher standard of living.

Why did it take this guy four debates to pick up where his dad left off?

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Supply and demand operate in the labor market. Cut out the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who increase the pool of unskilled labor at a time when that unskilled labor is becoming less and less useful and wages will rise.

I have to confess to being surprised that someone didn't go for it. It provided an easy virtue signalling opportunity, with a couple extra minutes tacked onto the 15 minutes of fame a heckler would've been able to enjoy if he had pledged to donate the $5k to an immigrant outreach center. It didn't happen, though, presumably because Trump did what he needed to do to ensure that it wouldn't happen. There's no excuse for underestimating Trump's framing ability at this point, so shame on me for not assuming he'd turn it around to his advantage.

To flip the script by making a joke out of the activist group and have it delivered by a high-profile Jew like Larry David--the caricature of a miserly old Jew if ever there was one (he impersonates Bernie Sanders, after all)--is to demonstrate masterful stagecraft:

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Steve Sailer, commenting on the how the head of the DEA, following similar remarks from the head of the FBI, recently insinuated that the year-over-year increase in violent crime is in part a consequence of police being reluctant to confront criminal behavior for fear of their every move being subject to intense (and hostile) public scrutiny:

One way to check this is to look at my graph of the 60 biggest cities ranked in order of increase in murder victims from pre August 9, 2014 to the same time period in 2015 (based on Carl Bialik’s data in FiveThirtyEight.) The biggest absolute increases have been in heavily black cities.

The Obama Administration’s promotion of BlackLivesMatter rageaholics seems to be encouraging blacks to murder blacks.

Okay, heavily black Baltimore tops the chart, but Memphis--which has a population that is almost identically black (63.1% to 63.3%, respectively)--is second to the bottom. Chicago is near the top, but Raleigh, a city in the South, has seen an absolute decrease in homicides. It's basically a wash. Racists will see what they want to see!

Fortunately, regression analysis can help resolve this dispute. Using Census quick facts data, we find that the correlation between the percentage of a city's population that was black in the 2010 census and the absolute change in the number of homicides it experienced in the first seven months of 2015 compared to the first seven months of 2014 is .44 (p-value = .0006).

When a single variable correlates this robustly with an outcome in the social sciences, it's worth paying attention to, even more so when we take into consideration potential discrepancies in the geography of police jurisdiction in 2015 and the geography of Census city designations in 2010. Noise and imprecision in measurement will virtually always weaken perceived correlative relationships. In other words, the true relationship is probably even higher than .44.

Steve is one of the best in the business at noticing patterns, so it comes as little surprise that his general impression has empirical validation.

A plausible and seemingly obvious consequence of the "black = good, white = bad" narrative, embodied most saliently in the Black Lives Matter movement, is that blacks feel let off the leash. A corollary to that, though, is that whites tend to feel even more restrained (at least until they come to a breaking point and abruptly and savagely tear the arm off of the hand that has been slapping their cheeks for a generation).

When blacks, who already behave relatively poorly, are encouraged to behave with still less restraint than before and relatively well-behaved whites are simultaneously shamed for even allowing a putatively improper thought to materialize in the recesses of their minds, the gap in civilized behaviors between blacks and whites grows yet wider. Falsely portraying predatory blacks as victims pushes blacks to be more predatory. Falsely portraying white victims as predators pushes whites to become more sheepish (again, for some period of time before the threshold of tolerance is breached).

For awhile, it's great for race-hustling grievance mongers and virtue-signalling ethnomasochistic whites alike. Good things have a tendency of coming to an end, though.

Razib's post comparing Islamic cultural beliefs across several countries got me wondering about Islamic identity in the US. While the question of whether the adjective "Jewish" is a religious or an ethnic one is given consideration, no one would think to ask a similar question if the adjective in question was "Catholic", let alone "Christian".

The innocent reason inquiring about Jewishness in this context makes sense is because a substantial number of self-identified Jews are also self-described atheists or agnostics. People who identify as Christian are virtually all theists. If they come from an ancestrally Christian tradition but are atheists or agnostics by belief, they identify as having no religion. Many Jews do not do this.

The Muslim tendency in the US appears* to fall in between that of Jews and Christians. The following table shows the percentages of self-identified Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims who also self-identify as atheistic or agnostic:

Religion

A/A

Protestant

2.2%

Catholic

3.1%

Jewish

18.4%

Muslim

8.4%

GSS variables used: YEAR(1998-2014), RELIG(1,2,3,9), GOD(1-2)

* The small Muslim sample is worth noting. Sample sizes are 6913, 3329, 231, and 65 for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, respectively.

Thursday, November 05, 2015

Having ruined the land south of the Rio Grande, they've left their undesirable homes and now they're here crashing ours. They're not humble about it. They're not gracious about being able to live among people who create better civilizations than they do. Nope, they're just entitled little ingrates.

Similar to the Establishment's disdain for Trump, this high-brow hit job is backfiring.

Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Looking at the racial composition of his support, one could be forgiven for assuming Bernie Sanders to be a Republican rather than a Democrat. As the last couple Republican presidential candidates found out, that's scarcely enough to make it happen in the general election. It doesn't come close to cutting it on the left.

While a devious dissident might hope Sanders pulls that off, ripping the Fringe Coalition apart in the process, he isn't going to come close. His only real base of support exists among young white leftists, a cohort that constitutes about 15% of the Democratic electorate and less than 5% of the entire US adult population, and a cohort that is shrinking in significance by the day.